Intellectual Propertyhttp://www.alatechsource.org/taxonomy/term/6/0
enObama, Libraries and Technologyhttp://www.alatechsource.org/blog/2009/01/obama-libraries-and-technology.html
<p>In his first two days in office, President Obama has definitely given a lot of us the impression that he intends to be President 2.0. Obama's campaign famously used online social networking to tremendous effect, he has since been giving weekly addresses via YouTube and now the new <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov">White House Web Page</a> includes a <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/">blog</a>.</p>
<p>Now that the President has taken office and new policies are being enacted, what changes will we see in national policy towards libraries generally, and technology specifically?</p>
<p>For many information professionals, questions about freedom of information and intellectual freedom. Jessamyn West had a <a href="http://www.librarian.net/stax/2658/some-things-really-do-change-overnight/">great post</a> yesterday discussing some of the changes that are already underway. </p>
<p>An recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle oferred a slightly more critical<a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/01/17/MNH515C1KK.DTL"> assessment</a> in discussing Attorney General-Designate Eric Holder's confirmation hearing:</p>
<p><span style="background-color:rgb(192,192,192);">Eric Holder said at his confirmation hearing Thursday before the Senate Judiciary Committee that he supports renewing a section of the USA Patriot Act that allows FBI agents investigating international terrorism or espionage to seek records from businesses, libraries and bookstores. If not renewed by Congress, the provision will expire at the end of 2009.<br /><br />The searches must be authorized by a court that meets secretly and has approved the government's requests in nearly all cases, according to congressional reports. The target of the search does not have to be suspected of terrorism or any other crime. A permanent gag order that accompanies each search prohibits the business or library from telling anyone about it...<br /><br />..."I was disappointed" that Holder supports the bookstore and library searches, "although maybe not entirely surprised," Chris Finan, spokesman for the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, said Friday.</span></p>
<p><span style="background-color:rgb(192,192,192);">The provision Holder wants Congress to renew, known as Section 215, "gives the government far too much power to conduct fishing expeditions in the records of bookstore customers and library patrons," Finan said. "We never expected that the change of administration would mean we had any less of a fight on our hands."</span></p>
<p>Of course, President Obama has long been a supporter of libraries. Here at ALA his <a href="http://www.ala.org/ala/alonline/resources/selectedarticles/obama05.cfm">2005 Keynote Address</a> has been the subject of a lot of recent conversation. While librarians, along with the rest of the country, are eager to see what President Obama will mean to our profession, we are thrilled to know that he is an advocate for libraries and librarianship as well as a President who wants to make the use of new technology a hallmark of his administration.</p>
<p> </p>http://www.alatechsource.org/blog/2009/01/obama-libraries-and-technology.html#commentsIntellectual FreedomIntellectual PropertyInternet and American LifeTime-Shifting with TechnologyThu, 22 Jan 2009 15:36:50 +0000Daniel A. Freeman356 at http://www.alatechsource.orgWowio: It All Ads Uphttp://www.alatechsource.org/blog/2006/08/wowio-it-all-ads-up.html
<p><a href="http://www.wowio.com/index.asp">Wowio</a>, an LLC based in York, Pennsylvania, recently launched a free downloadable e-book service. The company's collection at launch is pretty sparse, but it does include both public domain and copyright-protected e-books. During my first use of the collection, I downloaded both <span style="font-style:italic;">The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn</span>—if for no other reason than to relish Emmeline Grangerford's mournful <a href="http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1190.html">Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots</a>—and <span style="font-style:italic;">Slaughterhouse Five</span>. <img title="YOUR AD HERE!!!!!!!" alt="YOUR AD HERE!!!!!!!" src="/media/blog/blank.billboard.jpg" align="left" border="0" /><br /><br />Although the service is free, in the sense of the absence of cash transfers, there is a price. First, a user needs to register, answering such required questions as birth date, zip code, credit-card number, gender, race (huh?), formal-education attainment, occupation, and salary. You also need to divulge a few of your favorite things, such as food (BBQ for me), music (blues), and hobbies (gardening). <br /><br />You also must consent to be exposed to some advertisements. During my speedy first use, the only ad I spotted was one for Wowio itself interleaved in the front matter of <span style="font-style:italic;">Slaughterhouse Five</span>. I registered last night, and as of today, I don't see any ads, clearly spawned from my Wowio registration, in my e-mail inbox. <img title="Your attention here, please!" alt="Your attention here, please!" src="/media/blog/Your.attention.please.jpg" align="right" border="0" /><br /><br />The idea of ads in "real books" is not new. As I recall, many of the paperbacks I purchased in my youth contained ads, usually for other books, but ads nevertheless. The journals and books, with nary a difference, published by the <a href="http://www.haworthpress.com/">Haworth Press</a> also come to mind as being replete with ads. Wowio's venture, coupled with the high probability that <a href="http://books.google.com/intl/en/googlebooks/about.html">Google's massive digitization project</a> will result in some sort of ad-based "free" service, makes me wonder if advertisements are about to invade the world of books in a big way. <br /><br /><img title="This Space for Rent" alt="This Space for Rent" src="/media/blog/this.space.for.rent.jpg" align="left" border="0" /> As we move deeper into the digital world, we seem to be bombarded by ads. Human attention is the precious commodity of this age, and advertisers seek every opportunity to make their pitches, even as you look over the shoulder of the pitcher during a televised baseball game. <br /><br />For some, another price to pay the Wowio piper will be the onerous PDF-file format the company uses. Granted, PDF is not as open and flexible as other file formats for e-books, and there are serious accessibility issues for blind and visually impaired individuals, but it is a serviceable file format.<img title="This is your brain... on ads." alt="This is your brain... on ads." src="/media/blog/for.rent.forhead.jpg" align="right" border="0" /><br /><br />I have read horribly designed and produced printed books, and I've listened to audiobooks with a dullard or dolt as the narrator, all because I wanted to ingest the content. If content is king, I renew my oath of fealty on a daily basis.<br /><br />By the way, if you don't remember the ode-to-Stephen episode in <span style="font-style:italic;">Huck Finn</span>, and if you didn't bother to the follow the link above to the poem, poor Stephen died an ignoble death by falling down a well. Mmmmm, that gives me an idea... We could have had some ads plastered on the walls of that well, maybe even in e-ink so we could change them to match the demographics of each subsequent victim, so that poor Stephen would have died with our highly targeted product on his mind.Technorati tags: <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/books">books</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/digitizing+books">digitizing books</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/E-Books">E-Books</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/ebooks">ebooks</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Google_Book_Search">Google_Book_Search</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/google+book+search">google book search</a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/research+libraries"> </a></p>http://www.alatechsource.org/blog/2006/08/wowio-it-all-ads-up.html#commentsAccessibilityDigitizing BooksIntellectual PropertyReadingFri, 18 Aug 2006 00:43:32 +0000Tom Peters122 at http://www.alatechsource.orgUC Libraries Join the Google Books Library Projecthttp://www.alatechsource.org/blog/2006/08/uc-libraries-join-the-google-books-library-project.html
<p><img border="0" align="right" src="/files/media/blog/Peters.Tom.outdoors.jpg" title="Tom Peters" alt="Tom Peters" />Soon after <a href="http://www.google.com">Google</a> announced in late 2004 the collaborative project—currently called the "<a href="http://books.google.com/googlebooks/library.html">Google Books Library Project</a>," involving the five research libraries of <span style="text-decoration:underline;"></span><a href="http://www-sul.stanford.edu/about_sulair/special_projects/google_sulair_project_faq.html">Stanford</a>, <a href="http://www.lib.umich.edu/mdp/">Michigan</a>, <a href="http://hul.harvard.edu/hgproject/index.html">Harvard</a>, <a href="http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/google/">Oxford</a>, and the <a href="http://www.nypl.org/press/2004/google.cfm">New York Public Library</a>—to scan millions of books, the five libraries became known as the "G5 Group."<br /><br />When the G5 Group was mentioned in conversations among librarians, often there was at least a note of despair or hostility toward the G5 Group for collaborating with the "enemy," or for, perhaps, significantly altering the future course of research and research librarianship without consulting with representative samples of these communities.<br /><br />Longing to be a member of the G5 Group was not one of the dominant emotions I detected in the conversations I heard about their involvement in Google's massive digitization project. But evidently there is some longing out there.<br /><br />First, the Library of Congress began to <a href="http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2005/05-250.html">dabble with Google</a> in this project, which is not surprising. Then the <a href="http://libraries.universityofcalifornia.edu/">University of California Libraries</a> System—which collectively, across its 100 libraries, claims to have the largest research collection in the world—began serious discussions with Google, as evidenced by an <a href="http://dailycal.org/sharticle.php?id=20931">article</a> that appeared in the <span style="font-style:italic;">Daily Californian</span> in July. Reports in other publications, such as the <a href="http://www.calendarlive.com/books/cl-me-ucgoogle2aug02,0,4193029.story"><span style="font-style:italic;">Los Angeles Times</span></a> and <a href="http://chronicle.com/free/2006/08/2006080901t.htm" style="font-style:italic;">The Chronicle of Higher Education</a>, followed, culminating in the official <a href="http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/2006/aug09.html">August 9 press release</a> that an agreement had been struck.<br /><br />The press release emphasizes:<br /></p>
<ul><li>the public trust upon which this massive collection has been built;</li><li>the need for quick and easy means of discoverability;</li><li>the possibilities for new and accelerated forms of scholarly inquiry; and</li><li>the archival need for massive digital back-up copies of printed books in collections on or near areas of frequent seismic activity. </li></ul><p> The UC Libraries' System already is a member of the <a href="http://www.opencontentalliance.org/">Open Content Alliance</a>, which has also undertaken a very large-scale book-digitization project. The OCA, however, has intentionally limited its scanning efforts to books clearly in the public domain, which is estimated to be only twenty percent of the books held by the various libraries across the UC System. By becoming a major player in the Google Project, the UC System could potentially have thirty-four million books scanned, with one master copy going to Google and another staying with the UC System.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">The Chronicle</span> article quotes Adam Smith from Google stating that they are in active conversation with other research libraries with interesting special collections. Smith hinted that some of these libraries are located outside the United States, with Oxford University as the precedent. Perhaps before long the majority of the member libraries of the <a href="http://www.arl.org/">Association of Research</a><a href="http://www.arl.org/"> Libraries</a> will be Google partners. <br /><br />There has been much speculation about how Google plans to generate revenue from this massive digitization project. For the libraries involved, avoiding the cost of a massive digitization project seems to be a major motivation. In the <span style="font-style:italic;">Daily Californian</span> article, Dan Greenstein is attributed to have said, but is not directly quoted, that through the use of Google's top-secret and proprietary scanning process, the cost to scan a book will be only $1 or $2, compared to approximately $30 via the process being used by the Open Content Alliance.<br /><br />Other monetary advantages may redound to the Google libraries as well. For example, Google recently announced plans to build an advertising office that will employ approximately 1,000 people in <a href="http://www.mlive.com/business/aanews/index.ssf?/base/business-4/1153044710131380.xml&amp;coll=2">Ann Arbor</a>, which coincidentally is the home of the University of Michigan, one of the original G5 Group members. All politics, as they say, are local.Technorati tags: <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/book+scanning">book scanning</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/books">books</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Copyright">Copyright</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/digitizing+books">digitizing books</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/E-Books">E-Books</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Google_Book_Search">Google_Book_Search</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/google+book+search">google book search</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/librarians">librarians</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/librarianship">librarianship</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Libraries">Libraries</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Open_Content_Alliance">Open_Content_Alliance</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/research+libraries">research libraries</a></p>http://www.alatechsource.org/blog/2006/08/uc-libraries-join-the-google-books-library-project.html#commentsAccessibilityDigital LibrariesDigitizing BooksIntellectual PropertyWed, 09 Aug 2006 23:36:12 +0000Tom Peters120 at http://www.alatechsource.orgSqueezing the E-Turniphttp://www.alatechsource.org/blog/2005/11/squeezing-the-eturnip.html
<p>
<img align="left" title="Tom Peters Head Shot" alt="Tom Peters Head Shot" src="/media/Peters.Tom.head.blog.jpg" /></p>
<p>Earlier this week the <em>Wall Street Journal</em> reported that Google and an unnamed publisher were having discussions about leasing access to e-books. The general idea is that users would pay approximately ten percent of the list price for the printed book to be able to read the e-book for one week. In other words, they're talking about a pay-per-circ digital lending library.</p>
<p>When it comes to new (and recycled) schemes for pricing e-books, November has been a "Katy-bar-the-door" month. Amazon and Random House announced separate plans to sell e-books in less-than-complete chunks, such as chapters. If we manage to get through the remainder of the month without any more turkey announcements like this, we'll have another cause for thanksgiving. </p>
<p>During my daily pre-dawn walk with Max my dog, I pondered all of these related developments. Max, as usual, had devoted his entire attention to the ambient olfactory sensations. </p>
<p>I decided to conduct a little thought experiment. Here's the question I posed to myself: If I were one of the big six publishers with lots of e-books and other e-content to lease or sell, what would be the most comprehensive pricing model I could construct to squeeze the most juice from my crop of e-turnips?</p>
<p>Here's my progress report: I would set up my pricing scheme as a multi-dimensional spreadsheet. The x-axis would be a continuum of sizes of content chunks, starting with a letter and progressing through words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, entire books, and series until we arrived at everything that had ever been written. In my thought experiment, my mental publishing firm suddenly had gained control over all written content, and the public domain had ceased to exist. </p>
<p>Please note that I did not attempt to place "snippet" on the x-axis. I may be an early-rising thought experimenter, but I'm not stupid.</p>
<p>The y-axis represented time, moving through the seconds, hours, days, weeks, years, decades, centuries, and millennia until reaching eternity, or as we like to say, "access in perpetuity." I suppose the subliminal advertisers would lobby for the nanosecond as a viable unit of time-sharing for e-content, but you get my point.</p>
<p>So far, so good. Each cell in this two-dimensional spreadsheet would contain a price. If you want to lease access to an entire e-book for a week, it will cost so much. If you want to own a copy of everything that has ever been written (with continuous updates, of course), we'll offer you easy payment terms at reasonable interest rates.</p>
<p>Then I remembered that in the reports of the report of the rumored discussions between Google and an unnamed publisher, other terms of use were being added to the stew, such as terms that prohibit downloading and copying of the e-book on loan. In my mental model that would require a z-axis to cover all the ways a reader can interact with a text. The continuum is not as neat as the continua for the x and y axes, but at one end would be "mere reading" and it would branch out to include downloading, transferring to one or more of the hundreds of portable devices, copying and pasting chunks, highlighting, underlining, glossing, etc.</p>
<p>But clustering of purchasers also requires another axis. Now we are beyond the easily comprehended three-dimensions. At one end of this axis sits the individual, the common reader. But my Ã¼ber-publisher also is willing to sell and lease e-content to immediate families, extended families, work groups, friends, all the registered users of a library, library consortia, all the citizens of a state, nations, continents, and the world. There may even be some squeezable revenue through sales and leases to other species. I glance at Max and detect a slight nod of approval for that last thought.</p>
<p>I probably would need yet another axis to cover all the other types of content that could be bundled with the "core" content I would be leasing or selling. I'm thinking about translations, audio versions, raw data sets, earlier editions, drafts, and the like.</p>
<p>By the time I reached the corner of 20th Street and Morningside Drive, my head was spinning. When the thought experimenters who had focused on the digital music industry had heard the music of the spheres, the result had been the beautifully pristine vision of the celestial jukebox. Why had my thought experiment about the e-book industry resulted in the spreadsheet from hell?</p>
<p>There is an old saying that you cannot squeeze blood from a turnip, which, according to the 3rd edition (2002) of <a href="http://www.bartleby.com/59/3/youcantsquee.html" style="font-style:italic;">The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy</a> means that you cannot get out of people more than what they are willing or able to give. Perhaps my ultimate pricing scheme for e-books won't generate much revenue after all. Come to think of it, I don't even like turnips. </p>http://www.alatechsource.org/blog/2005/11/squeezing-the-eturnip.html#commentsAccessibilityDigitizing BooksIntellectual PropertyFri, 18 Nov 2005 16:31:19 +0000Tom Peters36 at http://www.alatechsource.orgLemony Snippetshttp://www.alatechsource.org/blog/2005/11/lemony-snippets.html
<p>Lots of folks are sour on snippets. Google has made lemonade out of the old word "snippet" by using it to describe what will be presented to users when they perform a full-text search in the Google Print Library and retrieve hits for the search term in a work still protected by copyright. Here is Google's brief (and a little vague) description of how this works on the "common questions" page about the Google Print Library Project (<a href="http://print.google.com/googleprint/common.html">http://print.google.com/googleprint/common.html</a>): "For library books still in copyright, you'll be able to find the book in your search result, but we will only display bibliographic information and a few short snippets of the book."</p>
<p>The wholesale snippetization of entire research collections has many authors, publishers, librarians, and readers riled. In a November 1 article in the <em>Wall Street Journal</em>, Michael Gorman opined, "They are reducing scholarly texts to paragraphs." He described as "ridiculous" Google's argument that a potential reader and/or purchaser of a book could make an informed decision after reading a few snippets. </p>
<p>Let's not forget, however, that readers need to make their reading and book-purchasing decisions based on something, such as the recommendations of friends and colleagues, citations in other books, browsing in libraries and bookstores, enjoyment of other books by the same author, and reading book reviews. I would argue that a reader's "knowledge" of a book always is inextricably linked to the milieu in which that reader first heard about or discovered that book. Snippets are just another aid in this context-sensitive selection decision process. </p>
<p>Snippets seem, to me, to be little more than the old printed keyword-in-context index updated for the new millennium and writ large. Are subject headings just emaciated externally created snippets impressed upon a book, usually by someone who has not actually read the entire book before determining its essential aboutness? Perhaps book titles are little more than proto-snippets. </p>
<p>One problem that mass snippetization poses for librarianship is that it forces us to confront one of the nagging fundamental questions: What is use? When can we say that a person has used an information object and, by extension, knows it? Usage is a continuum and a slippery slope. Some books I "know of" only through discussions with colleagues and references in other books I've read. Some books I read cover to cover and yet make no claims to actually knowing with any sense of confidence what the author was trying to convey or argue. My favorite books I continue to re-read across the years, feeling that I know them well, yet still pleasantly surprised when I discover potential new meanings and layers of richness. </p>
<p>In case you're wondering, the <em>Oxford English Dictionary</em> lists the first known use of the word "snippet" in 1664 in Part II, Canto iii, Line 824 of Samuel Butler's satirical poem, <span style="font-style:italic;">Hudibras</span>: "Witches Simpling, and on Gibbets Cutting from Malefactors snippets." (I wonder if anyone ever complained about the OED's use of snippets?) Perhaps Google's use of in-copyright snippets will lead to a rebirth of the use of gibbetsâ€”not the word, but the real thing.</p>http://www.alatechsource.org/blog/2005/11/lemony-snippets.html#commentsDigitizing BooksIntellectual PropertyWed, 02 Nov 2005 17:38:23 +0000Tom Peters29 at http://www.alatechsource.orgMakin' Copies and Caching Inhttp://www.alatechsource.org/blog/2005/10/makin-copies-and-caching-in.html
<p>
<img align="left" title="Tom Peters Head Shot" alt="Tom Peters Head Shot" src="/media/Peters.Tom.head.blog.jpg" /></p>
<p>I don't know what possessed me to write a blog entry about copyright. Hasn't enough been written about copyright already<span style="font-size:12pt;">â€”</span>even if the future of copyright, fair use, the right of first sale, and intellectual property in general is arguably one of the essential issues currently confronting society and culture? </p>
<p>Here's how it happened. I was walking our dog Max in the pre-dawn darkness. Overhead, the slightly past-full moon was beginning its decline. The warm breeze reminded me that today probably will be the final day this year of summerlike weather in beautiful Blue Springs.</p>
<p>An MP3 player was in my pocket and earbuds were in my ears, but I wasn't listening to any music or audio book. Rather, as Max tugged me from my slumber, I was mulling over an <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/technology/2005-10-17-google-print_x.htm">article</a> that appeared in yesterday's <span style="font-style:italic;">USA Today</span> about the lawsuit between the Authors Guild and Google over Google Print. (I thank the ever vigilant Bernie Sloan, with an obligatory nod to Stanley Fish, for pointing out this article in the quintessential artifact of the popular press.)</p>
<p>In the article, Doug Armato from the University of Minnesota Press is quoted as stating, "They're making unauthorized copies, period. It's not fair use." After I read Doug's first sentence, I thought, "He's right." Google is making copies, and they are not seeking prior authorization to do so. Instead, if a copyright holder asks them to stop or pass over a specific book, they promise to comply. </p>
<p>Then I thought, "So what?" I wish the people involved with the intellectual property system didn't obsess as much over the making of copies as over what individuals do with content<span style="font-size:12pt;">â€”</span>copied, memorized, created from scratch, whatever. Policing unauthorized copying increasingly seems a silly and futile way to balance the rights and responsibilities of authors, publishers, librarians, readers, and others. </p>
<p>When the right to control copying materialized, the act of making copies was nasty, brutish, arduous, and expensive. From the age of scribes right down to the heyday of photocopiers in libraries, the act of making copies always was a deliberate act involving at least a modicum of premeditation. </p>
<p>Things have changed. Copying has become so prevalent <span style="font-size:12pt;"></span>in the networked computerized age that, often, the act loses its premeditated, deliberate qualities. Computerized networked information systems are built on the bedrock<span style="font-size:12pt;">â€”</span>or shifting sands, depending on your perspective<span style="font-size:12pt;">â€”</span>of making copies. I don't think you even could read this blog entry without having made some sort of copy (i.e., viewing a "copy" of this post in your aggregator). Those involved with the <a href="http://www.lockss.org/">LOCKSS initiative (Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe)</a> seem to understand the new order better than those in the Authors Guild.</p>
<p>Copying has become so commonplace we have begun giving it catchier names, such as "caching." As a general rule, we should be wary of any human behavior for which we feel compelled to give a French name. All you saboteurs and bombardiers, if the shoe fits... </p>
<p>Some copying remains a willful act. After I purchase a music CD, I deliberately choose to rip it in order to listen to tunes when and where I want. I don't share those ripped files with anyone, not even Max. This strikes me as the type of time, place, and device shifting that Jenny Levine and others have been championing for years, and that librarianship as a whole should defend and encourage, because it improves the information experience for end-users. </p>
<p>The idea behind copyright is noble: generally stated, to advance science, the arts, culture, and society. But copyright also has its seamier side, with its struggles for control and cash. Even if Google Print raises the sales tide for printed books and floats all publisher boats, in the long run, Google may make more money helping people find the right book than publishers, authors, and other copyright holders will make selling those right books. This may be part of the source of chagrin for copyright holders. It's not the lost sales, but the creation of a different revenue stream. </p>
<p>Max barked at a squirrel and brought me out of the copyright mist. I gazed again at the moon, which, upon reflection, merely reflects the sun's light. Reflection, like caching, could be considered a form of copying. You bad, bad, beautiful moon. </p>http://www.alatechsource.org/blog/2005/10/makin-copies-and-caching-in.html#commentsIntellectual PropertyWed, 19 Oct 2005 15:34:22 +0000Tom Peters22 at http://www.alatechsource.org